Expertise unlocked for every user
Today at Microsoft Ignite, we introduced agents in Microsoft 365 to drive the next level of business value for organizations. These agents are ready to use, each with specialized skills and knowledge to support unique roles. They work alongside or on behalf of a person, team, or organization to handle simple tasks and more complex, business processes.
As part of agents in Microsoft 365, we’re excited to announce the general availability of SharePoint agents today, enabling users to turn SharePoint sites and documents into scoped agents that are subject matter experts for your business needs. These agents empower everyone to quickly surface insights, scale expertise, and make informed decisions. SharePoint agents will begin rolling out this week with expected completion by the end of this calendar year.
SharePoint agents put your content to work
Employees create a vast amount of digital content. Every day two billion files are added to SharePoint and OneDrive, and two million new SharePoint sites are created. This expansive amount of knowledge is key to your organization’s success but it’s often hard for employees to find, absorb, and act efficiently with all this information. AI is a critical tool to unlock your organizational content to enable productivity and better business decisions.
SharePoint agents offer a powerful capability for everyone to define agents as specifically as needed. These agents are designed to empower site owners and users to quickly access valuable information and insights for their projects and tasks. Agents created in SharePoint are like subject matter experts for you and team members, helping to streamline workflows and enhance productivity.
Common scenarios for creating and using agents
To better understand how you might use these agents in your organization, whether for yourself or with coworkers, consider a few real-world examples from our private preview customers:
Accelerate customer support: Eaton, a global intelligent power management company in electrical, aerospace, and vehicle production, created SharePoint agents for process documentation and knowledge sharing. These agents significantly aided both IT and engineering teams by simplifying information retrieval and enhancing efficiency. Notably, engineering teams benefited from improved knowledge sharing and quicker responses to customer queries. The simple creation process allowed these agents to streamline workflows effectively using only SharePoint content.
Other scenarios:
Onboard new team members: New hires can face an overwhelming learning curve as they navigate new processes and tools. A team lead can create an onboarding agent as a welcoming and knowledgeable point of contact to help new team members ramp up efficiently, providing access to the most current information and the source files. Empower new hires to tackle projects mid-stream with the resources they need to feel confident.
Product support: A field incident report agent based on the latest product documentation can serve as a 24/7 first line of triage for handling issues while also formulating a roadmap for product innovation to better meet customer needs. Beyond Q&A, this agent can offer trend analysis, root cause analysis, escalation categorization, and more to engineering and product support teams – bringing a holistic view of field escalations and the strategies needed to optimize customer experiences.
Budget planning: A universal truth in business is that time is one of the most valuable commodities. Enter the budget planning agent used by a finance team, built on the team site and equipped with budget policies, past budget reports, and key forecast documentation. This agent provides recommendations and prioritizations for the upcoming planning cycle, and reduces time intensive analysis and costly margins of error so the team can focus on strategic financial planning.
Our private preview customers focused on identifying their most valuable SharePoint content and determining where SharePoint agents can maximize the content value to support their organization’s key goals and outcomes. We’re looking forward to hearing how you will use agents SharePoint as this capability enters general availability.
Easy to use and create
Every SharePoint site includes an agent scoped for the site’s content, ready to assist you instantly. These ready-made agents are an easy starting point to get answers without combing through the site or digging around with search—they can be used immediately without any customization.
On a SharePoint site, you can find the site agent from the Copilot icon on the right side of the ribbon at the top. This agent’s name defaults to the same as the site name, and will be at the top of the “Approved for this site” list.
Figure 1: Default agent scoped to a SharePoint siteFor specific projects or tasks, any SharePoint user can create a customized agent based on the relevant files, folders, or sites, with just one click.
You can create SharePoint agents from these three entry points:
- The Copilot icon in the top ribbon (just like how you access the ready-made agent), click “Create an agent” from the drop-down menu.
- Your document library, choose files and click “Create an agent” from the top menu.
- The Home tab on the left side of the screen, click the “+ New” drop-down menu and select “Agent.”
Find all the agents that you work with, including those that others shared with you, from the Copilot icon in the top ribbon. You can also find the custom-created agents listed alongside other files located in your document library, or search for them like you would other files.
Initially, these agents support file formats such as Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Loop, PDF, HTML, and more (see FAQ for file type support). Coming soon metadata, lists, meeting recordings, video transcripts, and video files will also be supported.
If your project or site progresses or pivots, the agents will stay in lockstep with your content, always working with the latest information. Your agent is automatically updated as you edit the files it is grounded on, or as you add or delete additional source content to the selected folders or sites.
Share and collaborate in Teams
Agents can easily be shared via email or within Teams chats, allowing teams to work with the same accurate and relevant information. Not only are coworkers able to use the agent that you shared, but @mentioning the agent in a group chat setting gives the team a subject matter expert ready to assist and facilitate collaboration.
Figure 3: An agent being @Mentioned in a Microsoft Teams chat
Built on security you trust to protect your data and limit oversharing
Powered by the same AI technology as Microsoft 365 Copilot, these agents operate within the secure boundaries of Microsoft 365, maintaining high standards of data privacy and security. This means you don’t need to take the extra step of moving your files outside of Microsoft 365, and all your data security protections, such as retention and sensitivity labels, remain in place to help prevent data loss.
SharePoint agents adhere to existing SharePoint user permissions and aforementioned labels to ensure data is protected and help prevent the oversharing of sensitive information. Users still only have access to the files they are authorized to view or edit. This agent does not broadly share the files you selected whenever you share the agent with others in your organization. Learn more about how Microsoft 365 Copilot addresses oversharing with enhanced content governance capabilities.
Here’s a situation where you can maintain data security when not everyone has access to the agent and the content it’s grounded on:
A group of employees are in a Teams chat and an agent is added to support the project. A leader with access to sensitive information asks the agent a question, but some chat members do not have the necessary permissions to the source information. The leader is prompted to review and approve the agent’s response for sharing with people who do not have access. Those without access to the content will be notified that the agent is waiting for permission to share. When the leader elects to share the response, those who don’t have access to the source files will only see the response and not the files it is grounded on.
Figure 4: The agent will notify the one who shared the agent if some of the users in the chat do not have access to the knowledge sources in the responseFigure 5: The agent recognizes the different permission levels in the chat and provides a prompt to update or maintain permission settings
SharePoint site owners will be able to manage agents in the following ways:
- Approve the ready-made agents for the site
- Choose a default agent for the site
- Feature other user-created agents in the drop-down menu from the Copilot icon in the top ribbon, so they are visible to site members
Only people who create and have edit permissions to the site will be able to create and edit customized agents. This leverages the same permission model already working in SharePoint, so that users who are closest to the knowledge on the site can create agents that improve their daily work. Regular editors can create their own agents, but only site owners can set the agent for their site, as well as other agents featured for everyone else.
Manage SharePoint agents just like files—because they are
Agents created using SharePoint data are file-based, with a “.agent” file extension format. They are stored within the same site or folder where they were created. Since they are files, you can manage them just like you manage other files. You can copy, move, delete, or archive them.
Figure 6: The agent is stored in the Document library and can be managed like other files
Take your agents farther with Copilot Studio
With Microsoft Copilot Studio integration, currently in private preview, you can customize these agents further, such as with third-party sources, actions, and automation workflows. You can then publish the agent to the Teams app catalog.
Figure 7: Microsoft Copilot Studio web pageIncluded in Microsoft 365 Copilot license with option for a pay-as-you-go meter coming soon
We are thrilled to include SharePoint agents as a key feature within the Microsoft 365 Copilot license. As of today, you can create, use, and share agents as part of your Microsoft 365 Copilot license.
Alternatively, if your tenant is licensed for Microsoft Copilot Studio consumption billing, SharePoint agents will soon be available to users as a pay-as-you-go meter.
Coming soon, through the Microsoft 365 admin center, admins will also be able to manage consumption billing for SharePoint agents.
Promotional offer: Enable every employee to experience SharePoint agents
Agents are a relatively new AI innovation, so from January 6, 2025, through June 30, 2025, we’re offering a promotion for qualifying organizations to experience SharePoint agents. Organizations with at least 50 Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses will receive 10,000 queries each month for non-Microsoft 365 Copilot license holders to use, create, share and interact with SharePoint agents. We hope that this promotional offer helps enhance knowledge sharing and teamwork and provide key learnings from your early adopters.
Learn more about this promotional offer. Admins can learn more about managing their trial access.
*Note: The start date of the promotion has been changed from December 1, when the promotion was originally announced, to January 6, in order to provide sufficient notice to admins.
Continuing to improve
We’re continuing to evolve this powerful, yet simple SharePoint capability and to innovate based on your feedback.
Here’s a look at our product roadmap releases planned for the coming months:
- Edit and share the ready-made SharePoint agents
- Include OneDrive files in your customized SharePoint agents
- Create your own customized agents in OneDrive
- Create agents for your SharePoint hub sites
- Copilot Studio integration for advanced customizations (currently in private preview)
Get started with SharePoint agents today
Ready to implement SharePoint agents in your organization? Check out our SharePoint agents adoption page to find training videos, a communications kit, support articles, quick start guides, and more.
For additional resources, please visit:
- Microsoft Support - SharePoint agents for product details and FAQs.
- Microsoft Mechanics “One Click AI SharePoint agents" to get a technical deep dive directly from the product leader behind aSharePoint agents
Microsoft Ignite 2024 sessions you may be interested in:
- KEY01 | Ignite Keynote | Nov. 19 6:00 am PST
- GS05 | Unlock the Value of Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Studio | Nov. 20 6:30 AM PST
- BRK279 | Reimagine content management with SharePoint agents | Nov. 20 12:30 PM PST
- LAB442 | Build scoped, secure agents in a few clicks (Lab) | Nov. 20 11:15 AM PST
- LAB442-R1 | Build scoped, secure agents in a few clicks (Lab) | Nov. 21 1:00 PM PST
Activities in the new year:
- Thursday January 9, 2025: Join SharePoint agents engineers, designers, and product managers to learn more about the product with our Ask Me Anything event. Register now.
- Tuesday January 14, 2025: We will sit down with our Private Preview participants during the Intrazone podcast to get a deeper look at the business use cases for SharePoint agents. What worked, what we learned, and how can we move forward with some best practices for using SharePoint agents.
- Wednesday January 29, 2025: SharePoint: From concept to creation to impact + Live AMA. Check the Microsoft Tech Community Events page for details.
BONUS | See SharePoint agents 'in action' as shown during the Microsoft Ignite 2024 session, "Reimagine content management with SharePoint agents" (BRK279. Watch now:
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